Today, on the same topic, another tech site which generally gets a lot of things right (but whoever is responsible for writing about Telegram, or maybe their internal KB, is consistently wrong and doesn't care about feedback) wrote that it is an encrypted chats service: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/225750/ceo-en-oprichter-telegram... ("versleutelde-chatdienst" means that for those fact checking at home)
The average person I know that uses Telegram ("non-techie" as GP comment put it) certainly doesn't. People join telegram because it has a group they want to join, or via word-of-mouth of a friend recommending it. Normal people don't read tech news, and if they do they don't give it much weight.
Maybe that sucks, maybe they'd be better off somehow if they did, but the reality is that most people live in a different universe from those of us who care about e2ee security or read tech news with interest.
Also, people tend to state they have nothing to hide, when they feel they have nothing to fight with. But I can't count the number of times I've seen a stranger next to me on a bus cover their chat the second I sit next to them. Me, a complete random person with no interest in their life is a threat to them.
I just did it to gather anecdotal evidence and the answer was, the founder is in jail to protect their privacy.
Christo Grozev shared screenshots of a few CSAM channels yesterday, but if you search for them, they do not seem to exist.
Telegram clearly does less pre-moderation than Facebook, but they are smaller and have less computing and they do not seem to rely on the masses of Nigerian moderators that work for 5$/day as Facebook does.
My speculation is that he set a too high price to share the private data with france or USA.
It's only on HN I ever see people set up Telegram as some supposed uber-secure private app for Tor users and then demolish that strawman gleefully.